Turbo Kid

 Turbo Kid is an example of a game that does just enough, and that is okay. Better than being horrible.  Games are often too ambitious for their own good, and by the end of the game, I'm sick of it.  Turbo Kid is closer to a standard entry in the genre, with some flaws, but some really cool thing, and it excels for that. Not every game needs to be genre-defining, generational, or upper echelon. It is enough to be competent and fun, and that is where Turbo Kid succeeds.

If you have played a handful of search/action games, they all start to blend together for the worse. This game starts strong with removing itself from the cliches of the genre. I wish it would have leaned into these ideas even more. To get away from the classic movement traps like dash, wall jump, and double jump, they give the player a bike to ride.  This is a really interesting movement mechanic that functions like a lite version of the Trials bike game.  It's cool for traversal, and for quicker exploration.  You can summon it at any time with a small cooldown, which is a super fun way to do interesting things with it throughout the game. If you jump off the bike while going full speed, it will even crash into the enemy and do damage to them. I felt like a freak going BMX mode on my enemies by jumping off of a high speed bike and then shooting them in the face with my blaster.  Very cool.

On the bike, you go slow uphill, gain speed downhill, and even get bike-specific techniques.  There are bike race minigames that offer you three tiers of prizes in a Gold/Silver/Bronze fashion, and bike halfpipe trick challenges that do the same.  I can't stand things like this in a game unless they are done really well.  These are done competently enough to be fun and engaging on their own, and the cool thing about the bike mini-game challenges is that the most valuable rewards are the easier to get ones in the Bronze and Silver tier, and the Gold one is typically extraneous (like a bike kit that only changes the colors). They don't gate any progression or interesting items behind side games you may not be interesting in, and they are made well enough to be challenging without being too difficult.

Another trope of modern search/actions that Turbo Kid skirts around wonderfully are upgrades. I am sick to death of getting 4 health pieces to upgrade my health and 3 mana pieces to upgrade my magic.  There is no worse feeling than navigating to a secret section of the map and only getting a 1/4 upgrade.  It's a really cheap way to increase the total amount of collectibles without adding any enjoyment or meaning to them.  Health upgrades in Turbo Kid either come in a full heart or a half heart, and the half heart doesn't need to be collected to make a full, it simply adds a half heart to your total health pool. Turbo, which is ammo for specialty guns, only have one type of upgrade, and every Turbo upgrade you find on the map makes your Turbo reserves larger.  After experiencing it, I can't believe this hasn't been instituted in the genre before, except I can, because most modern search/actions try to be Hollow Knight and fail.

The scope of this game is small, and better off for that. Too many games and game developers are influenced by the media around them and end up implementing those ideas in their own games, probably without even realizing.  Another trope that may not be as prevalent, but is all too noticeable, is that games follow the "Link to the Past," progression method.  Link to the Past has a section of the game where you collect the 3 pendants, then the world changes. Your initial quest changes, and what you thought was the full game has now expanded to something much larger.  Games will follow this pattern, where the world you see as soon as you are able to access the world is not your actual, long-term goal, and I find that it is overplayed, and often feels disjointed and fragmented. Turbo Kid suffers from this on a small scale as well, but because those sections are quick and streamlined, it doesn't feel as annoying and obtrusive.  The initial segment is very short, so once you get into the "main" game, it doesn't differ from that new objective. There are some secret spaces, but no areas that are not main-game sections. When the game begins, you lose 3 key items and then need to recollect them. After that you need to collect 4 main items. Since the game is so short and direct, it doesn't feel like a slog or a huge change in the world to go through these sections. The collection of the initial 3 items are also not quest items, you are collecting your main gear items.  The pacing of the game saves it from the drudge of others.

Turbo Kid is a really good example of the mantra of "graphics don't matter." It has clunky, shitty, disgusting pixel graphics, but the game plays so well and is fun, and there is a lot of charm and heart built on top of it, that you can clearly and easily overlook the bad graphics. The graphics are shitty because they are ugly to look at. The trend of doing pixel graphics in modern games sucks ass and needs to stop. The characters look like microwaved puke. It's a strange thing that developers seek to use these pixel style graphics, perhaps in the way of not being able to make good art, but that's the only thing they decide to skimp on.  The animations of this game are fluid and unique, the controls are snappy and responsive, the pacing is balanced, the concepts are modern. For some reason they didn't sacrifice any of that, but decided to make the characters look like high school cafeteria roadkill. It sickens me.  The lesson to be learned is I suffered through that because it was genuinely fun to play. I encountered zero bugs or glitches, and it controlled very well.

Part of the enjoyment of the game was due to it's pacing, but I feel like that wasn't intended. It's just relatively short. Traversing the world needs to be fun on its own, even without objectives or goals. There is no incentive to seek out rewards or backtrack if it is a tiresome burden to get where you want to go and fight your way there.  Many games will show you rewards, and I will feel excited to attempt to get to 100% completion, but by the time I get to the end of the game, I'm ready for it to be over. At that point I will beat it and never touch it again.  I was quite thorough in my initial searching in this game, but I still needed to do some major backtracking. Even with a dedicated item search tool, or in lieu of a really incredible map system, you essentially have to return to every single part of the map to try and detect the missing items. Snooze. They used all their ingenuity in the biking sections and then fell apart when it came to their items and collectables.  Still, I finished with 90% collection. 

While the game also starts off very strong with their exploration, the final few upgrades are trite and derivative to the point of making me retroactively annoyed.  After getting a cool bike, and a bike upgrade to make accessing areas an interesting, challenging bike movement puzzle, they end up giving you an air dash and a wall jump anyway.  Boooo - get off the stage!! It pains me to see such a distinguished entry into a game fall apart with such lame, tacked-on upgrades. 

The combat starts off decent enough, but also peters out.  You have a blaster to start the game, and very quickly get a machete and a charged shot. While you have this kit, the fights are difficult, yet balanced. It's enjoyable to overcome the challenges.  By the time you reach the point where you start getting weapon upgrades, it gives you several reasons to not have to use them. You will undoubtedly have a bunch of heart upgrades, because they are plentiful. I ended up brute forcing a lot of the more difficult fights by purposely tanking damage, not even trying to avoid hits, and still ending the fight with over half health. On top of that, when you finally start unlocking cool weapon types, you don't need to use them for the above reason, and you don't really want to use them because they all use the same ammo type: Turbo energy. If you use half of your Turbo meter using the buzzsaw shot, you only have half to use the rest of the guns. I never once used the rockets or the slime gun in a fight. All of the special weapons have traversal or exploration uses, which is interesting, but very few applications of each. You get the electric gun, and then there are probably less than 10 places to use it to unlock an electrically powered door, and half of those are bonus secrets that are not needed to progress in the game at all.  The most challenging and fun fights were the bosses. They were designed very well, were unique, and were quite difficult. Until you get to the last boss and you're so overpowered it's essentially a gimme. It felt like a let down.

This is the habit the game formed: wasted opportunity. You can see the ambition, the ideas, the thoughtfulness, but it simply is not implemented to maximum usefulness. Unique and compelling movement that gets replaced by the same generic schlock as a below average search action.  Cool and powerful gun upgrades that end up barely being needed or valuable.  In spite of that, it is fun and cool and neat, and sets itself at least enough apart from the waves of copycat games to be worth a playthrough.  The risks it took made it a wonderful experience, and all the basic or duplicate ideas were its downfall.  I truly don't think it's worth the current price tag of $20, simply because there are way better games for that price. If you love search/action games, this is worth a single playthrough, but it will leave you wanting more.